Sunday, February 27, 2011

CoverItLive is a staple of our interaction with fans, and today was the peak example. Five blogs running at the same time -- women's tennis, baseball, women's basketball and SEC Indoor Track from home and gymnastics from the road in Chicago. At one point, a combination of more than 500 active readers.

On the blogs, including tennis, road softball, road men's basketball and others, the weekend saw 16 interactive blog events, with a total of 6,928 readers (that's an average of 433 per event and a average duration of 3h 38 min). We kept eyeballs on ArkansasRazorbacks.com through this tool for a total reader duration of 92d 13h 19min. Of the almost 7,000 readers, 79% stayed on the site more than a minute. The average reader's duration was 44 minutes. Compare that stat with any other content, short of streaming video, and even then, good luck with getting 44 minute latency.

Baseball led the way in fan numbers -- for the second straight weekend we averaged over 1,000 readers. That's for non-conference games -- numbers very much like last spring's SEC weekends. It's pretty rewarding when you've faced the kind of internet hardships -- heck, just the grind of a four to five hour live blog -- and know that you've interacted with thousands of fans.

My baseball blogs this weekend had a peak of 1,368 (Saturday's Utah second game) and an average of 1,111. What's remarkable is right now before there's been really a lot of time for the Sunday game to generate a lot of replay (usually don't check that for at least 48 hours after), the average number of replays is 264.

Track wasn't far behind in fans and by far the winner on duration. Zack Swartz and Nate Keys, my interns, were alternating on those long days at the Randal Tyson Track Center, and they were entertaining SEC track fans with a duration average of 57 minutes. I haven't even generated that with football games. They had 2.086 readers and an average of 695 readers -- multi-day track highs for us.

These are our immediate number via CiL. The Google Analytics come in the next day or so.

For this past weekend, our New Media division produced five live video events -- four of those as concurrent events (gymnastics overlapping with baseball Friday; women's basketball and baseball Sunday) -- and managed stream coming from our student crew of video folks at track all three days. We also had our iHog app running baseball audio Friday and Sunday, men's basketball on Saturday, plus managing the audio streams generally for the overall website.